7/10
Man Against the Elements
14 June 2008
Warning: Spoilers
**SPOILERS** Out hunting for food for the members of his expedition Indian scout Zachary Bass, Richard Harris,is suddenly attacked by a grizzly bear who savagely mauls him. Coming to Bass' rescue the frontiersmen of his expedition gun down the grizzly but not after the bear just about did Bass in.

With both massive claw and bite wounds as well as having lost a near-fatal amount of blood it's decided by the leader of the expedition Captain Filmore Henry, John Huston, to give him a proper and Christian funeral but there's only one catch! Bass, as badly injured as he is, is still clinging on to life!

With the two frontiersmen Fogarty & Lowire, Percy Herbert & Dennis Waterman, watching and waiting for Bass to finally kick off they turn tail and run at the sight of a group of Arikara Indians in the area leaving Zachary Bass to his fate. It turned out that Bass' fate was to survive and live to see his new born son whom at the time he never expected to live to see at all!

Inspiring and touching story of how Zachary Bass defied the odds and survived in the bitter and frozen woodlands an mountains west of the Missouri River. Bass not a religious man who was very cynical of life-due to hie own life experiences-found a reservoir of new strength to help him struggle through life's hardships. Which turned out to be a combination of belief in himself as well as that of an Almighty omnipresent and benevolent higher power: God.

Fighting off wolves and mountain lions for food in order to survive Bass soon becomes strong enough to make his way to the Missouri on foot just before Captain Henry's expedition. It's there that Bass finds himself in the middle of a life and death battle between Captain's Henry's men and hundreds of Arikara Indians lead by their chief Henry Wikoxon.

***SPOILER ALERT*** With most of Captain Henry's men killed by the rampaging Arikara Indians and it looking like curtains for those still surviving another miracle, one of many, happens in the movie to have Chief Wikoxon call his warriors off. Chief Wikoxon's great respect for Bass whom, in what Bass went through, he considers to be one of his own.

P.S The film "Man in the Wilderness" is actually based on a the true story of frontiersman and Indian scout Hugh Glass. Glass like Zachary Bass in the movie did survive a Grizzly attack and was left for dead by those in his expedition only to fool them surviving against impossible odds. Glass lived to be 53 years old, 13 years after that incident in the wild, only to be killed in 1833 together two fellow frontiersmen in an ambush by the Arikara Indians on the banks of the Yellowstone River.
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